How do you stop overwrought mourners from falling into open grave holes?

How do you handle a naked woman sunbathing on a tombstone?

And what kind of intestinal fortitude is needed to dig up a decayed body?

Amazing things keep occurring at Vancouver’s 126-year-old cemetery.

Above ground. And six-feet under.

A RICH HISTORY

David Dowsett, 65, has spent his entire career at Mountain View. He even played among its wobbly tombstones when he was a teenager. But he still seems shy about his work.

When strangers ask him what he does for a living, Dowsett confesses, “I sometimes just say I work for the city of Vancouver.”

He doesn’t even have many cemetery jokes at the ready. Give him a few moments, however, and he comes up with some standards.

“People are dying to get in here” is one of them. And, “We have a lot of people working under us.”

In many cultures around the world, the job of gravedigger often goes to members of the underclasses. Some cultures associate gravediggers with unclean spirits.

In Shakespeare’s era in England, gravediggers were outsiders — treated often as jesters who laughed at the expense of the well-to-do.

When the melancholy Shakespearean prince, Hamlet, ends up in a conversation with cemetery workers and a skull, the gravediggers tell their own joke.

“Who builds the strongest houses?” one asks.

Answer: “The gravemaker. His houses last until the end of time.”

Despite the stigma associated with those who bury the dead in the cold ground, it didn’t affect the career of Abraham Lincoln, who for a short time as a young man was the gravedigger — also known as the sexton — for his Indiana church. Rock performers Rod Stewart and Joe Strummer were gravediggers, too.

But in this bureaucratic era, those who work with bodies in various stages of decomposition are not even called “gravediggers.”

As Dowsett says, they are officially known as “field workers,” “cemetery technicians” or “operators.”

When he’s not making graves, Dowsett cuts the grass and tracks the coyotes, skunks and ravens who live on the 104-acre cemetery grounds. It’s relatively calm work in a park-like setting.

But in all kinds of weather, Dowsett also stands judiciously beside many open graves, while roughly 400 grieving families each year say goodbye to loved ones. The young deaths, Dowsett says, are the hardest.

Although all four gravediggers at Mountain View have worked there for decades, Dowsett goes back the furthest.

His Scottish parents moved into the east Vancouver neighbourhood in 1921. He attended Mackenzie elementary school on 39th Avenue.

He still remembers the first time, as a youth in the 1950s, he was playing among the Mountain View graves and saw Chinese mourners celebrate their departed ancestors with a roasted pig’s head.

As he stands next to a freshly dug rectangular hole on an east-facing hill of the cemetery, Dowsett reminisces about how he initially dug graves with a shovel.

But now he uses a backhoe for graves, a shovel only for cremated remains.

Over the years Dowsett and his fellow gravediggers have observed the death rituals of thousands of Anglo-Saxons, Celts, Greeks, Roman Catholics, Jews, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Muslims, atheists, Sikhs, Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, Serbs and Filipinos.

Even though he now only sees pigs’ heads from time to time, Dowsett continues to note the eclectic ways some Asian people relate to their ancestors. He sounds like an ethnographer.

He has heard the graveside chanting and tinkling bells of the ethnic Chinese. He has smelled their burning incense, known as joss sticks.

Many Chinese honour their ancestors by bringing miniature cardboard houses and telephones to the cemetery, he says. Along with mock paper money, they burn them “to make their relatives happy in the afterlife.”

People from Eastern Europe provide Dowsett different inter-cultural experiences. He recalls one Serbian priest pouring an entire bottle of wine over a coffin before they lowered it into the ground.

Other Serbian families have pressed the gravediggers to drink wine with them. “Just a little bit in a plastic glass,” Dowsett says. They’ve also gone along when Egyptian mourners have insisted they share in sweet cakes.

More historical vignettes come from crew foreman Dennis Fabbro, who has worked at Mountain View since 1986.

Fabbro remembers when hundreds of Sikhs would walk up Fraser Street from Hamilton Harron Funeral Home as they followed a loved one’s body to Mountain View’s private crematorium, just north of John Oliver high school.

Like Jews, Muslims try to bury their loved ones before sunset the day after they die, says Fabbro, 52, who has Italian Catholic heritage.

And he remembers the challenge of meeting some Muslims’ requests to have their parent’s grave dug at an angle to the rest of the cemetery’s graves. That way the departed would face Mecca, the birthplace of Mohammed.

Looking out over the sweeping green grounds, Fabbro says most of those buried at Mountain View are cremated. But about one out of five ask for full-body burials.

He vividly remembers the Vietnamese mourners who have on various occasions left behind a live chicken, usually with a string around its neck.

When gravediggers caught up with the fowls, they didn’t know what to do with them. One time they called the SPCA. A second time they sent the bird to a farm.

Vietnamese people tend to mourn intensely, says Fabbro. “They can be the most scary for staff.”

Even though Fabbro has often seen grieving people of all ethnicities drape their bodies over coffins, one time a group of Vietnamese women were sobbing so hard they almost fell into the open pit.

“We had to form a human chain around the grave. We were worried they could have pushed one of us in there.”

THE MORBID DETAILS

Then there is the morbid factor.

When you are responsible for tens of thousands of human remains, sometimes you are called upon to dig them up and expose them to the light of day.

Some families want their loved-ones’ corpses moved to other cemeteries or mausoleums. Other families want to place new coffins on top of ones that are more than 40 years old.

This requires temporarily removing the original coffin, which had been buried six-feet underground, to make room for a second coffin in an eight-foot-deep hole.

Usually the old coffins have disintegrated. Most of the time — around 10 years after a burial — the body is “almost gone,” says Dowsett.

There is little more than a skeleton and perhaps some clothing. False teeth tend to last longer, as do artificial hips.

Depending on the wetness of the soil and the burial technique, however, some bodies are still … ripe.

Fabbro says his gravedigging crew never knows what to expect when reopening a grave.

“Sometimes the stench can be pretty bad.”

Some bodies can be “very, very well preserved,” Fabbro says. “They can get to a kind of waxy stage. Their faces go really smooth.”

If the body is wrapped in plastic, buried in a wet area or in a concrete liner, “it tends to seal them up a bit,” Dowsett says.

After the gravediggers explicitly describe some of the things they have seen happen to partly decomposed bodies, Fabbro says, “It’s the kind of thing people don’t want to know.”

Both men talk about the difficulty witnessing funerals of young people. It makes Fabbro feel more grateful for his own two children.

And Fabbro’s voice still reverberates with awe and excitement when he describes one particular body.

The woman had been dead 73 years, which is seven times longer than it usually takes for a corpse to turn to bones.

When Fabbro dug up the woman’s grave — to add a new coffin to the plot — he found the well-preserved casket’s lid only slightly broken.

“We were shocked by how intact the body was. She still had hair. We were mesmerized. You could still see her features. That was the most amazing one.”

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

What has changed the most at Mountain View over the decades?

The short answer is people of all cultures now seem less intimidated by death.

Dowsett remembers the 1960s and ‘70s when English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish families would treat the graveside ceremonies perfunctorily. “It used to be so sterile,” he says.

Dowsett notes that Asians have always stayed graveside until bodies are buried, though people of British heritage used to disappear as soon as they could.

But now, as Mountain View is increasingly appreciated as a rich repository of history and culture, the two gravediggers remark on how people of British and continental European ancestry linger longer.

Fabbro is often fascinated by their eulogies. “Those are the best.”

Often, when remarks are made about the deceased’s imperfections, Fabbro says he starts to laugh “because the family is all laughing. People normally walk away feeling a lot better.”

Men and women of European extraction are also joining Asians in videotaping graveside services more frequently. Yet, Dowsett says, no ethnic group compares to Filipinos for recording services to send to the homeland: He remembers more than 15 still and digital cameras at one burial.

Mountain View’s gravediggers always stay to the end of graveside services. It’s in part for liability purposes, so no one can complain later their loved one’s remains were stolen. Some people worry about such things.

But mostly the gravediggers stay to lower the casket on straps and refill the dirt. Jews have long shovelled in the soil themselves, at least partly. But now the gravediggers leave a pile of sandy soil beside every open plot.

Many people — including those Dowsett remembers attending the service of a young gang member — appreciate the chance to grab dirt in their own hands to sprinkle on the casket or urn.

The gravediggers often find their work is appreciated by families. After each service there are nearly always solemn handshakes.

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